Former hostage Keenan visits Beirut for 'another holiday' | Media | The Guardian Former hostage Keenan visits Beirut for 'another holiday' · After 17 years, author to film documentary about ordeal · He feels no hatred towards captors despite ordeal Former hostage Keenan visits Beirut for 'another holiday' · After 17 years, author to film documentary about ordeal · He feels no hatred towards captors despite ordeal Wednesday 15 August 2007 06.46 EDT First published on Wednesday 15 August 2007 06.46 EDT Share on Messenger Close Brian Keenan, the Belfast-born lecturer who was imprisoned and tortured for four and a half years by Shia militants, has returned to Lebanon to film a documentary about his experience. Seventeen years after being released, the former hostage has revisited the suburbs of Beirut where he was abducted at the height of the country's destructive civil war. The 56-year-old, who wrote a bestselling book, An Evil Cradling, about his captivity, gave a public reading and talk in the Lebanese capital about his ordeal.

Keenan was seized by Islamic Jihad gunmen on his way to his teaching job at the American University in Beirut in April 1986. Initially he was held in isolation and later moved to a series of underground dungeons where he was chained alongside another hostage, the British journalist John McCarthy. At his reading in Beirut last weekend, Keenan recalled the violence he had endured at the hands of his captors. "I often refer to my captivity as a holiday. I'm back for another holiday because I thought Lebanon owed me one," the Irish Times reported him as saying. "I was nine months on my own in a tiny frigging little cell. The food was slid under the door, I was taken out for 10 minutes a day to go to the toilet and put back in again." One of his captors, Keenan remarked, had been a cruel and psychotic man who took pleasure in inflicting pain. "If I had the capacity I would have slit his throat and smiled while doing it." But he insisted he bore no animosity towards those who had imprisoned him or towards the Lebanese people.

"I don't want revenge, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth leaves everybody blind and unable to speak." He had been due to visit Lebanon last year but the trip was postponed after the outbreak in summer of the Israel-Hizbullah war. Keenan's wife, Audrey, and his two sons, Cal and Jack, accompanied him on his three-week tour. The documentary is being made for BBC television. Earlier this year Keenan had been active supporting calls for the freeing of the kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston who was held hostage by an Islamist group in Gaza. He described in the Guardian the final "unreality of freedom" after "having spent months in a small room, most likely in the dark, having only the use of a radio for the intellectual stimulation that holds back your other companions for a short time - those being panic, anxiety, and fear so intense that you feel yourself suffocating, and you cannot do a thing about it." · To contact the MediaGuardian newsdesk email editor@mediatheguardian.com or phone 020 7239 9857.

For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 7278 2332. · If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication". Former Beirut Hostage at Charity Screening in Reading | Freedom from Torture Former Beirut Hostage at Charity Screening in Reading October 5, 2004 Former Beirut hostage John McCarthy will attend a screening in Reading next week of Blind Flight, a film about the ordeal that he endured. Blind Flight tells the story of how McCarthy, then a young television journalist, was kidnapped in Lebanon in the mid 1980's and held for more than five years. The film centres on the friendship he forged with fellow hostage Brian Keenan and is based on a book subsequently written by Keenan about their captivity called An Evil Cradling. McCarthy, now an author and broadcaster, will take to the stage to discuss both the film and his experiences, after the screening at Reading Film Theatre in the Palmer Building, University of Reading Whiteknights Campus, Shinfield Road on Tuesday October 12th. Also taking part in the discussion will be the film director John Furse.

After the screening, a collection will be taken for the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, a London based charity of which both John and Brian Keenan are patrons. Set up in 1985, the Medical Foundation is the only organisation in Britain solely dedicated to the treatment of torture victims. Last year it accepted more than 2,100 new patients at its north London treatment centre, as well as a regional centre in Greater Manchester, from nearly 100 different countries. Most people it treats are asylum seekers or refugees, but it also helps former British soldiers tortured in World War Two, and British citizens tortured abroad. Since its doors first opened nearly 40,000 have been treated with a unique blend of medical treatment, practical assistance and psychological support. Those wishing to become involved with the charity will be able to find out out more at the screening about a newly established Reading supporters group. Blind Flight stars Linus Roache as John McCarthy and Ian Hart as Brian Keenan. It went on general release earlier this year and was described by The Daily Telegraph as "moving in the extreme".

The Times described the two central characters as "vivid and convincing" while The Observer made it "Film of the Week" and hailed it as "full of arresting detail and memorable moments". Further details from Medical Foundation Press Office 0207 697 7792 Share this page: Brian Keenan: ‘The future is what matters now, not Beirut’ - Belfast Newsletter Brian Keenan: ‘The future is what matters now, not Beirut’ Former Beirut hostage Brian Keenan 07:00 Tuesday 19 August 2014 Have your say Brian Keenan suffered four years as a hostage in Beirut at the hands of Islamic Jihads. His book about his experiences, An Evil Cradling, was critically acclaimed. He talks about survival, letting go of bitterness, and fond memories of Orangefield High School in Belfast, writes JOANNE SAVAGE “I’m just Brian. I don’t see myself as exceptional in any way.” This is beguiling humility.

Born in 1950 in east Belfast and a pupil of Orangefield High School, Keenan left home, armed with two degrees in literature from the University of Ulster, to teach at an American university in Beirut. He says he loved Beirut as a city and still does – with its mix of different cultures and languages, its colours, the gorgeous Lebanese food. But the adventure became a nightmare: he was kidnapped on April 11, 1986 by Islamic Jihads. He had been wearing his father’s shirt on the day they took him; his father died after serving in the RAF and it was his death that had been the catalyst for Brian’s seeking a new life far from Belfast; not because he didn’t love his home turf, but because he was hungry for new experiences. For four and a half years the horror continued as Keenan was moved between prisons in Baalbek, Beirut and Sidon, blindfolded, beaten, half-starved, his hands and feet often chained, living always with the possibility of being killed, taken between locations in the boot of cars, chained to walls, often left in total isolation from other human beings.

You can only imagine the fear, the anxiety, the psychological torment of all of this, the sense of deep resentment, if not outright hatred you might feel towards men who robbed you of four years of your life, who beat and tortured you for reasons you did not fully understand, though you had done nothing wrong. And yet, as has been well documented, Keenan retains no bitterness towards his captors. “I just don’t see the point in sitting around and being bitter,” he says firmly. “I never think of them [the captors] and I have no bitterness towards them. I never knew them. I suspect many of them are now dead. “But I can’t say I forgive them in any religious sense because I am not religious and I am not sure what forgiveness really means as a concept. “None of those who held me hostage have ever asked me for forgiveness or told me they were sorry for what they did. That does not mean I wish them ill, that does not mean I have hatred for these men – I just feel my way of dealing with all that has happened to me was by bearing witness to it in writing An Evil Cradling and then to focus on the future instead of the past.

“And, definitely, to let all bitterness go.” In An Evil Cradling he writes movingly about how he felt the presence of his dead father around him during his ordeal, a sustaining presence, memories of better times that gave him strength. After two months in isolation he was moved to a cell shared with British journalist John McCarthy, who ironically had been sent to report on the Keenan case before he himself was taken hostage. The two became, and still are, firm friends; they were partners in survival and allies in the most unspeakable of circumstances. “I remember the first time I looked at John and he looked at me and we knew that if we wanted to get through this then we had to do it together. “And we did. “But today when I’m in London and we meet up and go for a drink we never talk about the horror of what happened in Beirut. We talk about what’s happening in our lives now, about family, about the future. “We both know what happened in Beirut and so we don’t need to dwell on it and go back over it. “Even in captivity there were times when we laughed together.

We played dominoes and John was a brilliant mimic, so it felt like he could bring all these other characters into our tiny prison cell. “And we were in a room no bigger than a small double-bed with these little mattresses you had to lift to get the door open.” He adds: “Neither of us want to be defined by what happened to us in Beirut.” Perhaps this focus on forward-thinking has been the secret of his survival, but there are bound to be days when memories from this traumatic past don’t float up to the surface. But Keenan seems a strong and ebullient personality, a person of deep inner strength and will power who can shake off the darkest recesses of memory and just keep going. Though he demurs at any grand descriptions of himself he will concede that he thinks he had to learn to be optimistic in order to survive his Beirut ordeal. “I do think I am quite an optimistic person – I think I had to be to survive four years of beatings and uncertainty. “I mean you were living with the constant possibility of death.

“I remember when I was blindfolded for long periods of time just thinking how much I wanted to see the world outside again, how much I took that for granted when I had it – the sight of things in front of me, people’s faces, colours, landscapes, the sky. “You retreat into your imagination when you can see nothing and have no freedom. “I imagined so much to keep myself going. There were dreams I wanted to live to fulfil – I wanted to have children, I wanted to write, I wanted to see other places. “I kept focused on the things I would do if and when I was released.” Today, he jokes, some of his friends say they wish they had his eyes, his vision, because after so long in darkness he sees things vividly and with an exuberance you can perhaps only experience when you have been deprived of it for a sustained period. Sign in The Strength to Survive : As hostages, three men shared similar experiences. But reclaiming their lives meant writing books with singular tales of resurrection. - latimes The Strength to Survive : As hostages, three men shared similar experiences. But reclaiming their lives meant writing books with singular tales of resurrection.

October 14, 1993 |ELIZABETH MEHREN | TIMES STAFF WRITER They were locked in a box of a cell, chained to walls and permitted just 10 minutes a day to relieve themselves. Humiliation ran high; sanity was precious, and possibly fleeting. To guard his mental equilibrium in these conditions, one man wrote an entire book inside his head. Another reclaimed the long-abandoned faith of his childhood. A third, shut off from sun and soil, replenished his tattered reserves of reason with dreams of landscape gardening. Released from confinement at the hands of Islamic extremists, Terry Waite, Terry Anderson and Brian Keenan sped their separate ways. But now, with books by the three ex-hostages launched simultaneously in this country, they find themselves reunited in an odd literary horse race. Publishing their stories in a single season pits Waite, Anderson and Keenan in a marketing strategy where heroism takes on a competitive edge. In reviews, the books are lumped together in the recently evolved genre known as "hostage memoirs." Comparisons are inevitable, and so apparently is the urge to offer more than three interpretations of the same dehumanizing experience.

Already, magazine excerpts from Anderson's "Den of Lions" (Crown) have painted a tense "tale of two Terrys" that suggest that he and Waite, in particular, grew to loathe one another. Anderson, embarrassed by what he insists was sensationalistic manipulation of his manuscript, promptly called Waite to apologize. What a silly trivialization of a saga that is most of all about survival, Anderson said. Besides, he pointed out, who on Earth could be surprised that five men locked in a room together for years on end might on occasion be "less than gentle and polite?" "People want to dwell on the discord," the former Beirut bureau chief for the Associated Press said from his home outside New York City. "What they don't dwell on is the support we gave one another." To promote "Taken on Trust," Waite's publisher, Harcourt Brace, meanwhile has taken out full-page ads in book sections around the country that promise the true story from "the most famous of all the hostages." By telephone from England, the former envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury decried this strange claim-to-confinement-fame as simple gimmickry.

But then Waite asked, "How's my book doing over there?"--the only one of the three to seek such information. "What about Terry's? And Brian's?" And Brian Keenan, secluded in an Irish village, waxed ambivalent about the prospect of leaping onto the hostage book bandwagon. His "An Evil Cradling" soared to the top of British best-seller lists when it was published there last year, making Keenan all too aware of the perils of public scrutiny. "It's rather like coming out of the freezer and into the frying pan," Keenan said. "One of the things I tell people is it seems its own kind of prison. And I've had enough of those." Yet while mindful of the consequences of reliving their ordeals, each ex-captive was acutely conscious of the benefits. In his nearly five years of confinement following his capture in January, 1987, Waite transformed his imprisonment into a journey of self-analysis. "A small boy sits on a garden chair under a clear blue sky," he wrote, longhand, on the yellow pad that awaited him following his release in 1991.

The words poured forth because they had already formed clearly in his head, serving as the ballast that Waite believes may well have been the key to his survival. "By objectifying the experience you learn how to understand it, and how to handle it," explained Waite, who, held in solitary, did not even see his fellow hostages for almost four years. Exploring his childhood, his work as an envoy for the Anglican Church and his status as a political prisoner allowed him also to delve into the deep philosophical questions of life, Waite said. Time, especially, took on new significance. "In some ways the past, the present and the future find their meaning in the moment," Waite said. "In some ways, without meaning to sound highfalutin, you begin to capture what is meant by eternity." For Keenan, the process of writing was about repossession. Keenan, a Belfast-born poet, had been in Beirut just four months, teaching English literature at the American University, when he was grabbed by Shi'ite gunmen in 1986.

Amid the beatings, the illness, the degradation and the disappointment of what he calls, with dripping irony, 4 1/2 years of "holidays in Lebanon," Keenan battled his own demons, daring madness to "take me where it would." Returning to freedom, Keenan plunged into the rigorous emotional portrait that became "An Evil Cradling" because "so much is taken and so much is lost" in the brutal depths impoundment. "Your identity. Your sense of values. Your future," Keenan said. "You have to repossess them." But Anderson--Boy Scout, honor student, Marine--was determined to leave no shred of himself with his captors. Former Beirut hostage marries | The Independent Former Beirut hostage marries Thursday 20 May 1993 23:02 BST Click to follow The Independent Online BRIAN KEENAN, the former Beirut hostage, has secretly married Audrey Doyle, a physiotherapist who helped nurse him back to health following his release in August 1990.

Journalists gathered yesterday in the village of Kilternan, Co Dublin, expecting the wedding to take place in the picturesque blue wooden church of Our Lady of the Wayside, but were initially disappointed when it emerged that the marriage had taken place the day before at a Dublin register office with only close family and friends present. But yesterday afternoon in front of 70 guests the marriage was given a religious blessing in a ceremony held in brilliant sunshine under a blossoming cherry tree. Mr Keenan's fellow hostage, John McCarthy, and his girlfriend, Jill Morrell, joined the couple for dinner the night before in a hotel facing the Wicklow mountains, where tight security provided by gardai ensured their privacy. Mr Keenan, 42, a former Belfast schoolteacher and English language teacher in Lebanon, had booked into the Enniscree Lodge Hotel in Kilternan on Wednesday evening with Ms Doyle, 29, and four friends. Mr Keenan, who lives near Westport, Co Mayo, has been promoting his book An Evil Cradling, an account of his imprisonment in the company of John McCarthy and Terry Waite. Later this year he is due to take up a lecturing post in the English department at Trinity College, Dublin.

More about: John Furse - Screenwriting/True Stories screenwriting/True Stories film treatments With Ian Hart, Blind Flight. Photo by Paul Chedlow © Paul Chedlow / Parallax Independent. Once in a while a script comes along that any actor would die for. Johnny Furse wrote such a script . Ian Hart, Actor, Blind Flight With Brian Keenan, author of An Evil Cradling, former Beirut hostage, 1992. Photo by Caroline Forbes © Caroline Forbes. The writing process and the lengthy development (of Blind Flight ) had seen a strong friendship grow, so trust was there. And I trusted Johnny's creative instinct. He’d taught me the basics of screenwriting, the need for narrative flow and shape, and I knew he wanted to tell our story, not one of his own. The process was one of sharing. The trust paid off. John McCarthy, writer, broadcaster, author with Jill Morrell of Some Other Rainbow, and former Beirut hostage John McCarthy confiding his hostage experience in Sanctuary .

Screenwriting/True Stories My screenwriting encompasses fiction as well as true stories - the latter a speciality of mine (see my Home page ) - particularly ones that I sense have some kind of mythical undertow, a connection with ‘the collective unconscious’. The challenge with true stories is turning them into screenplays that, whilst being truthful to their essence, work completely in their own right as cinematic drama, that are almost 'too good to be true'. That’s what separates the kind of work I’m interested in from the conventional ‘biopic’. I’m drawn to the complexity of the human condition, the mystery of others and their expression in the non-verbal. When writing I’m trying to sense what the characters might be hiding, consciously or unconsciously. The more elusive this proves, the more human and more compelling they promise to be. (see Screenplay Samples ) I try to give readers as rich a sense as possible of the inner lives of the characters and the inner life of the eventual film. How my work can best resonate with actors is of vital importance to me. I write the characters in great detail, with all the gestures, nuances, looks etc.

The more the actors have to choose from, the more they can find their own sense of their characters. (see Directing/Actors ) It's exciting when you find that you've written a complex characterisation that has great scope for actors' own interpretations. It makes you impatient to see what they'll do with it. I know that I'm on good ground when I sense that my characters, whether imagined or real people, resonate with my 'shadow family' - the gallery of father and mother figures, of course, but also brothers and sisters, who seem hard to escape in one's inner life! I’ve learnt how invaluable great script editors like Archie Tait and Jack Lechner are. Not least they can be so much more revealing than oneself about what one is up to! I also road-test my work widely during its progress, including among non-industry readers, to get a sense of what is and isn't coming though in my material. I need to feel not just that my work is creatively valuable but that it might be practically makeable. And why.

When writing film treatments and screenplays drawn from the work and lives of others, whether true stories or fiction, I like to keep a very open line with the real people involved about the progress of my work and, where practicable, to involve them in the creative process. This can be helpful in dealing with the central challenge - that your work satisfies them whilst remaining true to your own guiding lights. (see References ) The film and TV industries have become dominated by improperly digested text-book thinking about how stories and screenplays should operate and by equally questionable assumptions about audiences. This may make executives feel safer, but it's inhibiting to writers and filmmakers wanting to explore uncharted themes and differing forms of expression and thereby find new audiences. (see News: Current Projects ) Ingmar Bergman compared a screenplay to a musical score, with lead singers and instrumentalists as lead actors and the director as conductor. He was speaking as a director who wrote his own screenplays, but it's still an encouraging thought for writers constantly being told that their work is "simply a blueprint".

It's daunting to realise how many great films and filmmakers wouldn't stand a chance of getting developed and financed if they were starting out in the present, highly conservative climate, even by the State bodies supposedly responsible for developing new work and practitioners. Take Bergman, Bunuel, Godard and perm any number. And how would Trainspotting fare now? I’ve always liked Graham Greene’s exhortation to ‘tread the line between what is and what could be’ – the romantic realist’s take on art, politics and living. And Picasso’s ‘I don’t seek; I find’ – the intuitive’s abiding openness to surprise, chance, accident, serendipity, the inexplicable. I have worked closely with John for over a year and have been surprised and delighted at his sensitivity and intuition. He ‘got’ the story better than almost anyone I have worked with and his focus was always on the accuracy of his portrayal and loyalty towards the authors. His subtle use of imagery expanded the drama into another dimension while remaining true to the real events. I consider him a friend now.

Former Beirut hostage Brian Keenan: 30 years on for the Irishman whose unimaginable kidnapping became a global news story - Irish Post The Irish Post Awards Home | Life & Style | News | Former Beirut hostage Brian Keenan: 30 years on for the Irishman whose unimaginable kidnapping became a global news story Former Beirut hostage Brian Keenan: 30 years on for the Irishman whose unimaginable kidnapping became a global news story April 12, 2016 , By Siobhan Breatnach Brian Keenan pictured in Dublin in 2011 Photo: Sasko Lazarov/RollingNews.ie THIRTY years ago today former Beirut hostage Brian Keenan was kidnapped by Islamic extremists and held for four-and-a-half years. He speaks to SIOBHÁN BREATNACH bout surviving the odds and finding peace of mind in surprising places THREE decades on from an inconceivable four-and-a-half year kidnapping ordeal that made him a household name, former Beirut hostage Brian Keenan is feeling philosophical about life.

Thirty years ago today, on April 11, 1986, the Belfast native’s life was changed in the most unimaginable way when he was captured by terror group Islamic Jihad in Lebanon. As one of over a hundred people taken hostage in the Middle East in the 1980s and early 90s, it was a crisis that received international attention. With conflict still raging in the region today, his story is as relevant now than ever. “About six or eight months ago a woman came over to me,” Keenan says. “I was in Tesco when she came over and said ‘I just wanted to say I’ve seen you here a few times but I didn’t want to come over, but I thought I’d better come over today and say welcome home’.” He laughs. “That’s what people remember, they remember the hostage and that’s always reinforced to them because of what’s happening in the Middle East, people getting executed and murdered. It’s always recent to them.” Brian Keenan pictured at a press conference in Dublin Airport in August 1990 following his release Photo: RollingNews.ie His predictions for what lies ahead in countries such as Syria, Egypt, Turkey, offer little comfort.

“I think we’re in for 30 years of this,” he says. “My own view is that this is not going to be fixed with peace agreements. “The map of the Middle East is going to be redrawn again and I hope that those who draw it are more careful and considerate with that they’re doing. Some people have vested interest in creating conflict. “I think that ISIS, or whatever it calls itself, will die of its own poison. A nation state that doesn’t nurture feelings of humanity, of love and compassion, will wither away of its own poison. Unfortunately it will create a wasteland before that happens.” Brian Keenan with his wife Audrey, pictured in Dublin in 2006 Photo: Leon Farrell/RollingNews.ie But life today for the writer and broadcaster, living happily with his family in Dublin, couldn’t be further from the years he spent in a concrete cell – often in solitary confinement, blind-folded, interrogated, chained half-naked and beaten, at the mercurial whim of his captors. It was an experience he describes as being dragged through kicking and screaming. “You didn’t know if it was night or day.

In the end, after a long time, I kind of gave up and said right if I’m going to go mad here, I’m going to go mad,” he says. “I’m going to choose it, that’s what I did, I let it go. “You play the pied piper to your own insanity. You’re not fighting it anymore. You’re running ahead of it. In some way you are stronger than it by not fighting it. Then what’s fearful becomes fantastic.” Having left Belfast in 1985 disenchanted by its troubled streets, Keenan arrived in Beruit to take up a teaching position in the city’s American University. The intention was to stay in Lebanon for a year or two before going to Thailand, his urge to travel being fueled by a desire to find something greater than himself. “When I left I had no intentions of coming back to Ireland, it wasn’t in the long view for me,” he says. “I’ve been a traveller all my life. But if I went to the bottom of the street I could get lost. “But I learned that what I was looking for wasn’t going to be found in a psychical place. The landscape I wanted to be was me, was in me.

“We all have a route map laid down in our central nervous system and we all have to follow that one way or the other, either blindly or willingly,” he adds. “You have to come back from your point of departure to understand where you’ve been and how meaningful it is.” Brian found safety and peace in Westport following his release And Ireland became just that following his emotional release in August 1990, when he sought refuge in Westport, Co. Mayo. He stayed for three years. “I was travelling around looking for a place to live but I was also looking for a safe house,” he says. “I came home to get away from journalists and TV. “A lot of curious things happened when I arrived in Mayo, as if there was a kind of invisible authority, an invisible voice saying stay. “I was there by myself, that’s what I wanted,” he adds. “When you come out of those situations it’s very easy to be led by people who are well-intentioned. “But they could easily lead you to places you don’t want to be and you’ve got to find yourself back again. Mayo was very inviting.

It’s a kind of wondrous landscape.” Brian Keenan with his sons Jack and Cal, then 8 and 6 in 2006 Photo: Leon Farrell/RollingNews.ie Now 65, Keenan’s life is grounded by his family – namely his wife and two teenage sons, 18 and 16. “In my case true north is my wife Audrey and my sons Jack and Cal. They give me my latitude and longitude in life. I never get lost wherever I go because I have my longitude and latitude with me and my true north fixed. I don’t need to travel so much anymore.” But that didn’t stop him from spending six months in the Alaskan wilderness, a trip inspired by Jack London’s book Call of the Wild, which he read as an eight-year-old boy. “He says in the far north he found his perspective, I was intrigued by that,” Keenan says of the adventure which was documented in his 2005 book Four-Quarters of Light: An Alaskan Journey.

Brian Keenan following his release in 1990 with his sisters Brenda Gillham and Elaine Spence who has campaigned for his freedom Photo: RollingNews.ie Though now living in the Irish capital, Belfast is a place he still regularly visits. It is home to his two sisters Elaine and Brenda, who campaigned tirelessly to secure his release at a time when many western governments abided by a ‘no negotiation’ policy. He describes having an impatience with the Northern Irish city he once called home over “its crippled capacity to remake itself”. “Alaska opens you up to an immensity with which, again not be to disparaging, but the Troubles in some places are like a nice ruin, almost as if it wants someone to fix it instead of fixing itself.” But the draw of friends and family, it would seem, overrides any greater irritations surrounding the social politics of the North. “There’s a time in our lives that we find out what is valuable, what is meaningful,” he says.

“I suppose like anybody else, time feels more important to me than money or wealth or books or travel or fame, which can feel like a kind of prison and I’ve had enough of that for a lifetime.” Belfast is Brian Keenan’s home city Keenan is not a religious man. “I leave religion to religious people,” he says. “Our capacity to believe is so immense, why should we reduce it down to whatever somebody with a cross or crucifix waves at us. “Again, I’m not being disparaging, but I think our capacity to believe is greater than the literary that is offered up to us.” So rather than turning to God during those torturous days in captivity, the Irishman found other ways to survive. “I used to exercise furiously,” he says. “You’re thinking about books or movies, you rewrite the movie. But you’re in a conflict situation so no matter what you think you’re doing, in the end it’s going to win. “I look at all these religions, you have the 12 Commandments or there’s this path, for me it doesn’t work like that. “You climb up on a ladder and someone takes the ladder from under you and you fall down again.

You’ve got to start climbing up again even though you know you’re going to fall down. “There was no alternative,” he adds. “There was no notice outside my cell door with a release date in it. Two of my friends were executed a few cells up from me, so you had to deal with that. “I didn’t know if I was going to be shot, I didn’t know what was going to happen to me.” “There was a guard once that said to me as he was drilling that pistol into my temple, he said ‘there is only one life, and we do much’ and I laughed at him because in the lunacy in my mind I had done more than he could do in a million lifetimes. “Because his lifetime was determined by a government and whatever religious nonsense that had fuelled his imagination.” Keenan would sing songs by fellow Belfast man Van Morrison during his time in captivity Photo: Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images) During those long dark days, Keenan promised himself that should he ever taste freedom again, he would buy an old stone cottage in the West of Ireland and write a book.

“I used to plan it in my head, the stones would be this way and the floor that…the promises you make yourself to keep yourself sane, when you’re out and free you have to actually go and do those things, it’s a kind of therapy.” Music also proved part of that therapy, both during and after his captivity. While appearing on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 1990 to mark his first Christmas as a free man in five years, the songs of James Galway, Joni Mitchell, Paul Brady and traditional Irish composer Seán Ó’Riada were among his chosen catalogue. And it was to the tune of fellow Belfast man Van Morrison that Keenan would sing to his cell-mate, British journalist John McCarthy, who in turn shared his best Mick Jagger impersonations. “I wanted to write a book but it wasn’t going to be about my time in Lebanon,” he says. “I didn’t think there was a book in it.

(There was…the 1991 award-winning autobiography An Evil Cradling, which won the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize among others.) Brian Keenan and son Jack along with British journalist and fellow hostage John McCarthy at Áras an Uachtaráin with president Mary McAleese in 2000 Photo: RollingNews.ie “I wanted to write a book about music,” Keenan adds. In 1996 he published Turlough, a book about 17th century Irish harpist Turlough O’Carolan that he spent two years researching while writer-in-residence at Trinity College Dublin. “I don’t have a musical bone in my body,” he admits. “But I found myself when I came home, travelling in the car and I would only play classical music. “I spent a lot of time in art galleries, one of the things I did when I was locked up was I painted pictures in my head and hung them on the walls of my cell, so I had my own little art gallery. “And I still do walk into art galleries and spend a lot of time there looking and thinking and discovering things.” Fear is a familiar companion for Brian Keenan.

“One of the problems I have, not so much now I’m older but when I was younger, is I was afraid of being afraid. When I went into the fearful aloneness of the Alaskan bush – which was quite a frightening experience – I didn’t expect to be that frightened. “It was isolation and aloneness in a vast panoramic landscape, not in a six foot by four foot dark cell – one is the flip side of the other.” While there he stayed with Indians and Inuits in Arctic Alaska, meditating with a shaman and chasing spirit bears. “There’s nothing in which I do not believe,” Keenan says. “Seeing spirit bears is alien to where I would have come from, but if you open yourself to receive things, things will come, you just have to not be afraid of it.” Wreckage after a car bomb explosion in Beirut in January, 1986. Photo: JOSEPH BARRAK/AFP/Getty Images His first journey back to Lebanon in 2007, one he’s made many times since, brought that all too familiar feeling of fear crashing back. “Audrey told me I had a lot of disturbing nightmares in the month or two before,” he says.

“When I did decide to make that first journey back, because I’d been planning it for a long time in my head, it didn’t kinda bother me.” But as his plane drew closer to the country, he recalls watching the small icon on the in-flight system and thinking: “As it got nearer and nearer to Beirut I thought ‘Woah, heck is there a reverse gear on this airplane?'” He laughs. “But there’s no going back, you can’t.” “I remember on that first journey out reading an article in the New York Times, there just happened to be an interview with a Lebanese writer called Elias Khoury – a very fine writer, writes a bit like Tolstoy. “He says there are other stories and other narratives that need to be articulated [in the Middle East] but people weren’t picking them up because they were too busy trying to survive. “And I thought that’s what I’m going to do, that’s what Lebanon owed me – whatever stories I found lying in the street, would be my payback.” Former Beirut hostage Brian Keenan Photo: Photocall Ireland Keenan is currently working on a book of short stories set in Beirut, as well as creating a travel piece for the BBC on China.

On his release he famously declared: “I’m going to visit all the countries in the world, eat all the food in the world, drink all the drink in the world, make love, I hope, to all the women in the world…” Looking back, he says, the reality was somewhat different. “When I came out I just wanted to get away from people. There was nothing specific I wanted to do, I didn’t desperately want a pint of Guinness – there was none of that.” “I’ve come to an understanding,” Keenan says. “I have been given much in life. I look at what I have been given and it’s greater than what’s been taken from me.” Brian Keenan will speak in Britain on Saturday, April 16 as part of a two-day psychotherapy conference The Heart of Silence being held at Regent’s University in London.

He will share his experience of silence in his talk ‘Between Pandemonium and Paradise – Breaking the sound barrier!’ BBC News | NORTHERN IRELAND | Honour for Belfast hostage survivor Saturday, 12 May, 2001, 09:25 GMT 10:25 UK Honour for Belfast hostage survivor Brian Keenan was released after four years as a hostage Former Beirut hostage Brian Keenan is to be honoured by the Northern Ireland university from which he graduated. The Belfast-born author is to receive the University of Ulster's Distinguished Graduate Award at a special ceremony in Londonderry next Wednesday. Mr Keenan was kidnapped by Arab fundamentalists in the Lebanon in April 1986 and held captive with other Western hostages including John McCarthy and Terry Waite. After a long campaign for his release by his family and supporters, he was freed in August 1990. Hostage autobiography He went on to write about his experiences in captivity in the acclaimed autobiography, An Evil Cradling. Mr Keenan completed a foundation course at Magee College in Londonderry and went on to complete a BA in English in the New University of Ulster in Coleraine in 1974.

He also holds a Masters degree in English from the university. Past recipients of the award include Sports Minister Kate Hoey and the BBC's Pat Loughrey. Search BBC News Online 18 years on, Beirut hostage Brian Keenan returns to the city that left him a 'living corpse' | Daily Mail Online 18 years on, Beirut hostage Brian Keenan returns to the city that left him a 'living corpse' By ANTONIA HOYLE Last updated at 00:47 16 March 2008 Former Beirut hostage Brian Keenan has told of his terror as he returned to the city for the first time since he was released from captivity 18 years ago. He was held in the Lebanese capital by Hezbollah terrorists during the country's civil war. For 1,574 days, he was kept in windowless cells, chained, beaten and blindfolded. Scroll down for more ... Good times: Brian Keenan with wife Audrey and children Jack and Cal in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley His book charting his captivity, An Evil Cradling, became an instant bestseller.

And now Brian, 57, has made the final step to putting his nightmare ordeal behind him by flying back to the land that kept him a "living corpse" for four years and four months. "I was terrified on that flight," he says. "I remember looking out of the window, down on the city, as the plane came in, not knowing what to expect." The trip has been filmed for a BBC2 documentary, Back To Beirut, in which he revisits the street he was kidnapped on, the cell where he was likely to have been held and areas ravaged by ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After spending a week on his own to deal with the "difficult stuff", he was joined by his wife, Audrey Doyle, 44 – the physiotherapist who helped nurse him back to health and whom he married in May 1993 – and their two children, Jack, ten, and Cal, eight. Brian wanted them to see the country as something other than a land of imprisonment and hate. Scroll down for more ...

Survivors: John McCarthy, Terry Waite and Brian Keenan reunited in 1993 He was captured in 1986, four months after moving from his native Belfast to work as a teacher at the American University in Beirut. With Americans Terry Anderson and Thomas Sutherland, and English journalist John McCarthy, whom he describes as a "brother" figure, he was held hostage in response to Britain's support of America's foreign policy in the Middle East. The same year, Church of England envoy Terry Waite was kidnapped in Beirut as he tried to negotiate their freedom. Brian was finally released in August 1990, John McCarthy was freed a year later and Mr Waite was kept until November 1991. "I always had a sense that I'd return to Lebanon," says Brian. "I wanted to see the country I never got to see. And I wanted to take my kids to the place where they knew bad things happened to their dad and to see it's not bad." When he arrived at Beirut Airport last summer, he was struck by how different it looked from the menacing, gun-filled terminal that greeted him back in 1986. "I thought maybe the plane had missed a turn somewhere," he smiles.

"There was a sea of people with colourful clothes, balloons, flowers and chocolates. "But, of course, it's still a city in turmoil. It looks like a beautiful flower, but you soon learn that there's poison in its petals." On the trip, Brian revisited the Mayflower Hotel, where he had spent his first few days in Beirut, and the villa he had rented near the university campus. It was outside its blue iron gate that he was ambushed on his way to work by four militiamen brandishing Kalashnikovs. Yet he insists the visit bought back no bad feelings and that he has nothing but happy memories of the house. "I loved that villa," he says. "It was exactly the same, and I didn't want to leave it." He also returned to the Ouzay district in southern Beirut, a poverty-stricken area where locals told him he probably spent the early months of his captivity. Brian cried on only one occasion, in Qana – a town struck by Israeli bombs during the July War of 2006, killing 28 civilians, 16 of them children. He admitted: "I wanted to be away as fast as possible." But the atmosphere lightened when his wife and sons arrived.

They went swimming and to the beach, to St Mema's monastery and the caves in Jeita, and out of the city to the Bekaa Valley – one of 15 places to where Brian, bound in masking tape and dumped in a bag, was driven in a coffin-sized box during his imprisonment. "That was unnerving because of what he went through," says Audrey. "Hezbollah spotted the camera equipment and stopped to check our passports. "I was very protective over the children and expected the worst, but it was totally different." Brian adds: "They had a ball, and now they'll associate Lebanon with fun times." He, too, remains positive about the country. "It's been constantly invaded, but it's survived," he says. "Its greatest attribute is its ability to endure." • Brian Keenan: Back To Beirut is on BBC2 on March 31 at 7pm.

Question: Which former Beirut hostage wrote “An Evil Cradling”?
Answer: Brian Keenan